green party hydrogen response 4: boris johnson

To recap: I did an analysis showing that London's prototype hydrogen buses cause considerably greater carbon emissions than diesel buses.

As the Green Party support this technology yet obviously shouldn't, I've been having correspondence with them about it. First up was MEP Caroline Lucas.

London's about to have a new larger hydrogen vehicle trial, so I've had exchanges with Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, the Green members of the London Assembly, as they are supporting this high-carbon technology. So the second exchange was with London Assembly member Darren Johnson

After that, the other Green London AM Jenny Jones, who table some questions to the Mayor, Boris Johnson.

Darren Johnson (no relation, you've gotta hope) has forwarded the answers.

Please find below the response from Boris Johnson, The Mayor of London to the questions that Darren Johnson, Green Party Member of the London Assembly raised on your behalf at the September 2008 London Assembly’s Mayors Question Time.

Hydrogen Buses, Question No: 1694/2008

Darren Johnson’s questions:

Will the mayor respond to the following questions from a member of the public:

- With the planned expansion of the trial of hydrogen buses going ahead this year, will you ensure the hydrogen is from renewable sources?

- What is the target for improving on the well to wheel calculation of CO2 emissions obtained from the previous CUTE [Clean Urban Transport for Europe, the pilot project that ended in 2006] trial?

- With the expansion of the existing scheme to encourage local authorities to install charge points for electric vehicles, what efforts are being made to ensure that this energy is from renewable sources?

- Will you carry out an assessment on the full potential for sewage in London to be used as a fuel for Combined Heat and Power generation, or for the bus fleet?

Boris Johnson’s response:

The new hydrogen buses will be on London’s roads by 2010. The hydrogen used will be produced by steam methane reforming. TfL [Transport for London] and Air Products (the refuelling supplier) are committed to putting in place measures that minimise the emissions from this method over the life of the projects as further advancements in abatement technology become available. In the future, TfL will look to procure hydrogen from the greenest sources and harness renewable technologies when they become available and are viable.

No well-to-wheel statistics were produced for the CUTE trial. TfL expects the new generation of buses to produce significantly lower emissions with the fuel-cell buses estimated to produce 50% less CO2 than a diesel bus on a well-to-wheel basis. These figures can be improved further when greener sources of hydrogen are developed.

TfL and GLA officers are in discussions with local authorities and energy suppliers to investigate the possibility of obtaining electricity from renewable sources.

In terms of building facilities, TfL have introduced combined heat-power generation to their newest building. This technology can be adapted to run on gases other than mains natural gas, should potential alternatives such as sewage become available. In terms of buses, current hybrid technology being trialled in the bus fleet offers immediately realisable CO2 benefits in London.

'No well-to-wheel statistics were produced for the CUTE trial'? Come with me to page 79 of CUTE's own report on their trial, where we find this chart.



The baseline is the impact of a normal diesel Mercedes Citaro bus, the same model that the hydrogen bus trial adapted.

To decode, the three groups are:
FC H2 St.ref. - fuel cell bus, powered by hydrogen from steam reforming (ie natural gas)
FC NEBUS, H2 St.ref. - the NEBUS, the hydrogen Citaro's predecssor, powered by a fuel cell with hydrogen from natural gas.
FC, H2 Hydro - fuel cell bus powered by hydrogen made from electricity from hydroelectric dams.

The four bars on the graph are:
PE (n.ren) - Primary energy from non-renewable resources
GWP100 - global warming potential (taking all climate impacts into account, not just CO2)
POCP - Summer smog formation potential
AP - Acidification potential

It clearly shows that the energy and climate impacts are substantially worse with the hydrogen bus when powered from natural gas.

Incidentally, as I said in my original piece, the hydroelectric thing is a red herring. Firstly, there's the way that hydroelectricity is seen a climate-neutral whereas it emits huge quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times as potent as CO2).

Beyond that, there is - as with all the 'hydrogen from renewable sources' stuff - the fact that it displaces electricity from fossil sources. I know I've said it before, but it seems that either I'm missing summat or else people are refusing to hear me.

If we earmark our renewables for this new electricity demand, they no longer feed the grid. So more fossils get burnt to make up the shortfall. It only works if the grid is entirely powered by renewables with capacity for all our present uses and our vehicles too.

Full marks to the Greens for their tenacity and responsiveness, it really does set them apart from the lower fob-off threshold of politicians in other parties. But they clearly haven't grasped the point of my writing to them, despite reiterations, citing sources and a couple of simple handy metaphors.

Answers that miss the point of questions that, in turn, missed the point are not really going to mean much, are they?

I'm following it up but, as with all the exchanges in this, I'm letting it run until the exchange has ended before I publish so that it's fairer and clearer for all concerned.

green party hydrogen response 3: jenny jones

A while ago I did some maths about London's hydrogen bus trials and found that the hydrogen buses are responsible for far greater carbon emissions than the diesel buses they seek to replace.

The Green Party support this technology, which is all the more worrying as there's to be a new and larger trial in London next year. As so many wild and inaccurate claims have been made about the ecological benefits of using hydrogen as a vehicle fuel, I'm presuming they've just never looked into it properly.

Because the London buses were part of a wider European trail, I had an exchange with Green MEP Caroline Lucas.

Then there was Green member of the London Assembly Darren Johnson. He said that he'd be 'doing more work in this area in the Autumn'.

I think we've got more detail on what that meant in a subsequent email from the office of the other Green London AM, Jenny Jones.

I am responding on behalf of Jenny Jones at the London Assembly, and I apologise for taking so long to get back to you.

We will put the following questions to the Mayor at next month's Mayor's Question Time, in the hope of finding a solution to some of the issues you raise:

- With the planned expansion of the trial of hydrogen buses going ahead this year, will you ensure that the hydrogen is from renewable sources?

- What is the target for improving on the well to wheel calculation of CO2 emissions obtained from the previous CUTE trial?

- With the expansion of the existing scheme to encourage local authorities to install charge points for electric vehicles, what efforts are being made to ensure that this energy is from renewable sources?

- Will you carry out an assessment on the full potential for sewage in London to be used as a fuel for Combine Heat and Power generation, or for the bus fleet?

I will let you know the response received.

To which I replied

Thanks for getting back to me. I'm glad to see you will be raising the issue. However, one element seems to miss the point

"With the planned expansion of the trial of hydrogen buses going ahead this year, will you ensure that the hydrogen is from renewable sources?"

Making hydrogen from a green electricity tariff causes the same emissions as if it were made from grid electricity. If we start powering our vehicles from the electricity grid, it adds to overall demand for electricity; taking the renewable electricity for hydrogen production means the same amount of electricity being generated from fossils generation elsewhere, so the extra emissions should be attributed to the new demand from hydrogen.

As an analogy, imagine if you went home tonight to find there were a hundred new cars parked on your street. The drivers of the new cars got there first and took the spaces, making the usual cars have to overcrowd other places and park illegally. The new drivers could claim that they were taking the sensible legal spaces, but we would all know it is they who are creating the problem.

Hydrogen only becomes effectively renewable if the whole grid is powered by renewables. Until then, it causes more fossils to be burned and should be counted as such. Not to do so is as disingenuous as the hydrogen manufacturers who claim it has no climate impact because the CO2 was released at the production plant.

Making hydrogen from electrolysis from the grid, as the analysis I previously sent to you showed, has around ten times the carbon emissions of a diesel bus. If someone came to the GLA with a proposal for a low exhaust-emission, tenfold carbon-emission bus that has twice the resource impact to manufacture than a normal bus, what would you say?

The other option is to make it using new dedicated renewable infrastructure. Even then, hydrogen makes no sense. We take electricity, convert it to hydrogen, then convert that back into electricity to power the bus. The hydrogen is, in effect, just a very inefficient battery.

Making hydrogen by electrolysis takes colossal amounts of electricity. It’s only 30% efficient, less than half the rating of any other method(1). It’s such a wasteful process that powering the UK’s vehicles with electrolysis hydrogen would take more electricity than we presently use for everything else combined(2). There are far more efficient batteries available.

Fuel cell vehicles that operate on hydrogen made with electrolysis consume four times as much electricity per mile as similarly-sized battery electric vehicles(3).

Using electric vehicles would mean only a quarter of that dedicated renewable generation infrastructure would be required. That would mean it would be 100% renewable a lot sooner, and a lot less money and resources to invest in the meantime, and it could not be used as an excuse for the fossil fuel companies to promote their present high-carbon hydrogen. It’s hard to see how electrolysis hydrogen is anything other than an extravagance.

"With the expansion of the existing scheme to encourage local authorities to install charge points for electric vehicles, what efforts are being made to ensure that this energy is from renewable sources?"

This has the same problems as described above regarding adding to electricity demand as so merely displacing emissions, but at least it's several times more efficient - and therefore a fraction of the emissions - of using hydrogen.

Thankyou for taking the time to write, and I look forward to seeing what response you get from the Mayor.

Please forgive the academic overtones of using footnotes, it's just that with any statistical or scientific assertion there should be a source to check, and in my experience green issues especially lend themselves to wild claims.

1-US National Academy of Engineering, Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, 'The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs', 2004, p39
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10922&page=39

2-'Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future', Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p74
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/media/news/tyndall_decarbonising_the_uk.pdf

3-Alec Brooks, 'CARB's Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles', Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=691

Some time later I got a copy of Boris Johnson's response (I'll publish that in a couple of days). The questions were tabled as set out above, with no amendments in the light of my reply pointing out that they don't actually address the 'issues I raise'.

Kudos to them for sticking at it, but if they miss the point, ignore the corrections and then ask the wrong questions, what they say is not going to be worth much.

fuck off fatso, says fat tory

In the same way that the last Conservative government had them preaching about family values whilst fucking prostitutes, their secretaries and even each other, so the fuckers who'll form the next Conservative government are limbering up to be hypocritical arsewipes.

There is "no excuse" for people to be too fat, the Conservatives will declare today

Mm-hmm?

Check out the guy who said it, Conservative health spokesperson Andrew Lansley. Note the way his second chin has more than double the mass of his first and its line of definition extends up to level with his eyes.

Mr Lansley acknowledged he could do more to improve his own fitness. He said: "I have a body mass index of 28 which means I'm classified as slightly overweight. I make no secret about the fact that I could be fitter, but following fitness training with Men's Health last year I use a running machine"

Nice plug for the magazine there. But anyway, this is him after a load of effort to reduce his weight?

Quite what the poor - those who can't afford fitness training with Men's Health or a running machine, or indeed any time or energy after they come in from spending all day at a shitty job that exhausts them - are meant to do isn't clear.

Lansley goes on to tell us that

a future Tory government would not "nanny" people, pledging to scrap support for "traffic light" food labelling

I'm not quite sure how traffic light labelling is nannying people. I'd have thought giving people the information so they can see through the packaging and marketing bullshit and letting them know if their food is genuinely fatty would be pretty useful to people trying to reduce obesity.

But then, it affects the profits of the supermarkets who make their money selling the fatty foods. Far better to blame the consumer even if they are deliberately misinformed by advertising and a lack of honest labelling.

And this is where we get into the darker side of all this. Rather like the way they've been blaming unemployment on the unemployed as a way to shift money from the poor to the rich, now they're rounding on other members of the underclass.

The health spokesman's comments on obesity echo David Cameron's speech last month when he said the poor, the obese and people with drug and alcohol problems are partly to blame for their own plight.

This is all about expanding what's chillingly and euphemistically called 'Conservative demands for greater personal responsibility across social policy'.

recycling symbols

what do worms attack?

I get the strong impression that the kid is familiar with the cycle of birth and death, and how, essentially, the world is one big cannibalistic restaurant.

Still, I can't help finding something ominous in the adult's last line. If I were that age, staring down at a worm practically the size of a python and wondering what it attacks, it would be material enough for a month of nightmares to be told 'it could eat you'.

integrity, why hast thou foresaken us?

I know that in a world where Pictures Of You by the Cure sells printers, Atmosphere by Joy Division sells bank accounts and Town Called Malice, In Between Days and pretty much every other song ever written sell cars I shouldn't be shocked by great music and its makers bending over to be violated by the engorged scaly phallus of the consumerism.

But I can't switch off this thing that expects people who create something of worth to honour what they have achieved instead of soiling it.

Only a couple of weeks after Antony and The Johnsons gave a new track to Prada in London Fashion Week come two TV adverts with John Lydon selling butter.

Lydon tries to justify it not with one of his his usual 'I make loads of money hahaha' statements but a claim that he's done it because this specific butter is just so great.

I for one am proud to be British and I’m proud to get behind a proper British brand. That’s why I’m supporting Country Life butter.

People know I only do things that I want to or that I believe in and I have to do it my way.

I think we can safely assume he got a fat cheque for his services.

Can we really believe he would have done it for free? If not, then his comment about believing in a particular brand of butter is a load of bollocks. He's a millionaire pretending to like stuff for more money.

Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll-call forever. End of story. You're another corporate shill, you're another whore at the capitalist gang-bang. And if you do a commercial, there's a price on your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink.
- Bill Hicks

cooking with gas

A further thought on that home electrolyser.

I dissed its stupidity for turning electricity into hydrogen into electricity. However, they tell us some of it can be used directly for cooking.

At present, when we cook with gas we are actually cooking with hydrogen. Natural gas is essentially methane; CH4, carbon and hydrogen. In burning it we combust the hydrogen and the carbon reacts with atmospheric oxygen to form CO2.

Manufacturing hydrogen from natural gas emits 9.1kg CO2 per kilo of hydrogen(1). So if cooking with gas is a way of splitting hydrogen from carbon, it seems reasonable to presume that we emit about the same when we cook with gas.

It takes 39kWh of electricity to make 1kg of hydrogen(2).

UK grid emissions are 480g of carbon dioxide per kWh(3).

480gx39 = 18,720g.

By this calculation, if the cooking hydrogen is made from grid electricity, it releases 18.72kg of carbon dioxide per kilo of hydrogen - more than twice the amount of someone cooking with gas.

= = = = = = = =

1. IPCC, Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p131.

2. J. Levene, B. Kroposki, and G. Sverdrup, Wind Energy and Production of Hydrogen and Electricity — Opportunities for Renewable Hydrogen, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, March 2006, p2.

3. Table 3, Fuel Mix Disclosure Data Table, DBERR 2006-07,

'ave some of that-a!

When Ian Dury found out he was dying, he didn't go down easily. He recorded a new album and toured and toured, belting it out.

He also got to do this short film. Yes, it's an ad for a newspaper, but they gave him the space to say anything he wanted. And as he was dying and wanted the cash to take care of his young kids, you can't begrudge him it at all.

Beautiful.

green party hydrogen response 2: darren johnson

The stuff about hydrogen vehicles is especially important to flag up in London. Not only did the city take part in the CUTE hydrogen bus trial, but Transport for London are testing a fleet of 70 hydrogen-powered vehicles starting next year.

TfL’s vehicles will be a mixture of buses, vans, cars and motorcycles that will be used by TfL staff, the police and the fire brigade... The five-year trial of both fuel cells and hydrogen combustion engines will cost around £22 million.

I sent my analysis to the Green members of the Greater London Authority, Darren Johnson (key issues include climate change) and Jenny Jones (sustainable transport).

After a month I did a reminder email prod, and shortly after received this

Many thanks for your letter, which you sent to both myself and my colleague Jenny Jones.

We agree with the emphasis on traffic reduction as the first priority. As the Green Transport Advisor to the previous mayor Jenny was pleased that London achieved zero growth in traffic, but was determined that we could actually reduce traffic and build on our reputation as the only major city in the world to switch people out of their cars and onto public transport. The planned expenditure of £500m on walking and cycling was due to be the next big step in making traffic reduction a reality.

We believe that London should use all the tools available in switching people to lower carbon transport. The programme of all new buses being hybrids by 2012 is something that we are pushing the new mayor to stick to. We continue to push for strict criteria to be applied to biofuels, so as to restrict their use in London.

We have supported the hydrogen partnership, despite being aware of the misgivings you raise and will state our reasons for doing so. Hydrogen is a technology which is still in development. We are not convinced by the optimists within the green movement who see the switch to hydrogen as the big transition which will take place in the next five to ten years (it has been five to ten years away for the last twenty years).

However, we do accept that progress has been made and the technology has taken significant steps towards mainstream production. We are aware of the well to wheels analysis of the current hydrogen vehicles and are pushing for the London contracts to include the sourcing of hydrogen to come from renewable energy within the capital.

In the meantime the technology needs supporting through the transition period when it is being piloted and trialled. There are significant potential gains for the environment and whilst the current generation of vehicles are not the most environmentally friendly, that is more to do with our lack of renewable energy infrastructure, rather than the buses themselves.

Finally, we think that air pollution is one of the major problems facing Londoners and hydrogen vehicles have an immediate impact because they are non-polluting at the point of use. Given that London is going to fail its 2008 target for PM10 and its 2010 target for NO2, anything which reduces these emissions has to be seriously considered.

CC: Jenny Jones

To which I replied:

Thankyou for your letter of 19 July replying to my letter regarding hydrogen buses. Please forgive the academic overtones of using footnotes in this letter but, as I’ve no doubt you personally know, in the area of green ideas you hear many surprising assertions and often they are without basis.

Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel has indeed ‘taken significant steps toward mainstream production’. Mainstream production is not a reason to support it if it can’t deliver sustainability. When a new idea is advancing and about to expand, that is precisely the time to consider it most carefully. Any earlier and it may never happen, any later it’ll be trying to get the genie back in the bottle.

You, personally, are in a position to influence this one way or the other. So there is a great responsibility to be sure of what you’re advocating. As CUTE’s own studies show it’s a massive increase in carbon emissions(1), you have every reason to oppose it.

Making hydrogen from a green electricity tariff causes the same emissions as if it were made from grid electricity. If we start powering our vehicles from the electricity grid, it adds to overall demand for electricity; taking the renewable electricity for hydrogen production means the same amount of electricity being generated from fossils generation elsewhere, so the extra emissions should be attributed to the new demand from hydrogen.

As an analogy, imagine if you went home tonight to find there were a hundred new cars parked on your street. The drivers of the new cars got there first and took the spaces, making the usual cars have to overcrowd other places and park illegally. The new drivers could claim that they were taking the sensible legal spaces, but we would all know it is they who are creating the problem.

Hydrogen only becomes effectively renewable if the whole grid is powered by renewables. Until then, it causes more fossils to be burned and should be counted as such. Not to do so is as disingenuous as the hydrogen manufacturers who claim it has no climate impact because the CO2 was released at the production plant. Making hydrogen from electrolysis from the grid, as the analysis I previously sent to you showed, has around ten times the carbon emissions of a diesel bus. If someone came to the GLA with a proposal for a low exhaust-emission, tenfold carbon-emission bus that has twice the resource impact to manufacture than a normal bus, what would you say?

It could, as you suggest, be made by electrolysis using new dedicated renewable infrastructure. Even then, hydrogen makes no sense. We take electricity, convert it to hydrogen, then convert that back into electricity to power the bus. The hydrogen is, in effect, just a very inefficient battery. Making hydrogen by electrolysis takes colossal amounts of electricity. It’s only 30% efficient, less than half the rating of any other method(2).There are far more efficient batteries available.

Fuel cell vehicles that operate on hydrogen made with electrolysis consume four times as much electricity per mile as similarly-sized battery electric vehicles(3). Using electric vehicles would mean a quarter of that dedicated renewable generation infrastructure would be required. That would mean it would be 100% renewable a lot sooner, and a lot less money and resources to invest in the meantime, and it could not be used as an excuse for the fossil fuel companies to promote high-carbon hydrogen.

It’s hard to see how it could ever be cost effective to make hydrogen from electrolysis. It’s such a wasteful process that powering the UK’s vehicles with electrolysis hydrogen would take more electricity than we presently use for everything else combined(4). The concept is being dangled as a reason to push on with hydrogen by the companies selling fossil-derived high carbon hydrogen, such as BP and Shell.

Not only would you need a lot more renewable electricity capacity for hydrogen, but the fuel cells themselves have relatively short lives. The average for a bus in the CUTE trial was 2,300 hours, which is around the limit of a fuel-cell’s life(5). These expensive bits of kit will need replacing on every bus about once a year.

Beyond this, I stress again that the upcoming TfL trial’s use of hydrogen as a combustion fuel is even worse; a lot more hydrogen used, and as it’s usually stored as a liquid there’s far greater energy use in manufacture (liquefying it and keeping it liquid until the point of use takes about half the energy it contains(6)). As far as I know, there’s not a single study that says liquefied hydrogen is more efficient than fuel-cells; everything I can find says it’s far worse.

Additionally, the reports of BMW’s hydrogen combustion car said that whilst it does have greatly reduced exhaust emissions compared to a petrol or diesel, nonetheless it does emit some nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, so it was not actually zero-emission(7). I presume that also applies to other hydrogen combustion vehicles. I share your concern for local air quality. However, surely reducing such emissions shouldn’t take precedence over concern for the climate impact, especially if that impact is many times worse than diesel, and much lower carbon zero-emission options are available.

Climate science demands that carbon emissions start to decline within the next decade or so. Instigating a plan that will actually increase emissions at this crucial time, that will require far more energy consumption and infrastructure than lower-carbon options on the table - how can that be the best use of financial resources, let alone be considered sustainable or green?

London should be looking for sustainable and effective solutions. The hydrogen bus could only eventually meet that by costing a huge amount of money and profligate waste of electricity.

Surely, among the real solutions, London should be looking for the cheapest and most efficient. That can never be hydrogen.
CC: Jenny Jones AM

1- CUTE, Project No.NNE5-2000-00113 Deliverable No.8 Final Report, 30 May 2006, p60, Fig 5-17. http://www.fuel-cell-bus-club.com/modules/UpDownload/store_folder/Publications/CUTE_D8_Final_Report.pdf
2- US National Academy of Engineering, Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs (2004), p39 http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10922&page=39
3- Alec Brooks, CARB's Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004 http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=691
4- Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p74 http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/media/news/tyndall_decarbonising_the_uk.pdf
5- Dr Sukhvinder Badwal, Fuel cells, Science on the way to the hydrogen economy, Australian Academy of Science, 5 May 2006 http://www.science.org.au/sats2006/badwal.htm
6- US National Academy of Engineering, Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs (2004), p38 http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10922&page=38 30-40% for liquefaction, around another 10% maintaining refrigeration until point of use.
7- Bruce Gain, Road Testing BMW's Hydrogen 7, Wired, 13 Nov 2006 http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2006/11/72100

That snail mail letter crossed in the post with an email from Darren Johnson:

Many thanks for this. We will be doing more work in this area in the
Autumn.

Cllr. Darren Johnson AM

There's been no response to my letter. I'm guessing that's it.

I want to be optimistic about what 'work in this area' means.

I want to believe it means that he's not just taking my word for it but is checking his sources, and if his investigations show my analysis to be broadly correct the Greens will reverse their position and speak out against hydrogen vehicles.

I want to believe it means he's seen through the great hydrogen decoy, namely that although it's a huge emitter now it could one day be made from water using renewable electricity.

That idea is like the 'capture ready' promise that's making people swallow new coal-fired power stations. It means higher emissions now on the promise of the possibility (without any binding obligation) that there could be lower emissions later.

Hydrogen from water has the advantage of actually existing, but the idea still swiftly falls apart. It would be just a way of storing electricity; a grossly inefficient way that can't compete with batteries that already exist, so why are we considering it?

The answer lies in the dividends for those who dangle the dazzling decoy, those who make the fossil hydrogen we use today and will continue to use for as long as it's more profitable than electrolysis. Which, factoring in manufacture from coal, is likely to be centuries to come.

I want to believe Darren Johnson's followed the logic and that, moving as slowly as a party's policy must do, is stirring something of a turnaround in the Greens' position on hydrogen.

Like agrofuels, hydrogen is the wrong answer because it asks the wrong question. It's saying 'how do we keep our vehicles on the road whilst maintaining the profits of the established oil companies?' rather than 'how do we live within sustainable emissions limits?'.

As with agrofuels, it's a climate 'solution' that actually causes greater emissions than burning oil. There can be no credible Green position other than opposition to hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.

we deserve no mercy

New Kids On The Block started their reunion tour today.

Homo sapiens has earned its extinction.